Learning gentleness

In recent days, I have been again impressed with the significance of a name that was well-known among British evangelicals in the last decades of the long 18th century, but today is mostly forgotten, namely, that of Abraham Booth (1734–1806).

The son of a Nottinghamshire farmer, Booth became a stocking weaver in his teens. He had no formal schooling and was compelled to teach himself to read and to write. His early Christian experience was spent among the General, i.e. Arminian, Baptists, but by 1768 he had undergone a complete revolution in his soteriology and had become a Calvinist. Not long after this embrace of Calvinism he wrote The Reign of Grace, from Its Rise to Its Consummation (1768), which the 20th-century Scottish theologian John Murray regarded as ‘one of the most eloquent and moving expositions of the subject of divine grace in the English language’.

It was this book which opened the way for his call to Little Prescot Street Baptist Church, Goodman’s Fields, in what was then a wealthy area of east London, home to merchants and professional men. Pastoring this church was a challenge to a man who had limited educational opportunities. Booth, though, more than rose to the challenge, in time mastering Greek, Latin and French, the first two taught to him by a Roman Catholic priest.

It was at Little Prescot Street that Booth preached one of his most stirring sermons, ‘Commerce in the Human Species, and the Enslaving of Innocent Persons, inimical to the Laws of Moses and the Gospel of Christ’. Preached on 29 January 1792, this sermon was long remembered as a key sermon in Baptist involvement in the fight to abolish both slavery and the slave trade. Booth’s fellow Londoner and Baptist Joseph Ivimey noted that Thomas Clarkson, a key abolitionist, considered it one of the most important documents in the early stages of the anti-slavery movement.

By the time of his death in 1806, Booth was one of the most trusted counsellors in the Particular Baptist denomination. His congregation genuinely adored him for what contemporaries called his ‘unsullied purity and kindliness’. One of them penned a most moving, though brief, tribute in the church minute book after his death: ‘He sought not ours, but us’.

Recently a friend passed along to me a transcription of one of Booth’s letters that he had come across in a 19th-century religious magazine. There are few of Booth’s letters extant, and this one is a gem. In reality, it is more of a wee note than a letter. It is a text that could have easily been tossed out, but it was preserved by the recipient for decades after she had received it.

It was written on 26 August 1805, five months before Booth’s death. The note was written to a female member of his congregation, to whom, it appears, he had been rather sharp the previous day when speaking with her.

My Christian Friend,
I take the first opportunity of acknowledging that, in my treatment of you yesterday, there were some improprieties, which, on reflection, I cannot but condemn, and on account of which I am very sorry. Oh for the meekness and gentleness of Christ! But, as I mean to take an early opportunity of calling upon you, I conclude, and remain,
Your unworthy pastor,
Abraham Booth.

In 1805, 26 August was a Monday, and thus it was on the Lord’s Day, 25 August, that Booth sinned in his speech against this sister. He was a mature Christian by this point in time, yet, as we see in this note, very conscious of the fact that there is never a moment in the believer’s life when grace and gentleness are not needed.